This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
tl;dr: Do any of you read Portugese?
I am having one of those moments where I feel like I must be losing my mind, because the alternative is that the world is even stupider than I already thought, which is just too depressing to countenance. I was doing some research on education for what are, ultimately, culture war purposes (I think parents are more important than teachers, and I think people to my political Left get this horribly wrong all the time) and I came across a citation that seemed potentially useful. I found it in this document (PDF warning) as both the title and on page one:
Now, any time I see a reference to critical theory from the 1960s, it piques my interest, because it has been my experience that a lot of people work very hard to obfuscate the origins of what is currently being called "Wokism," and used to be called "cultural Marxism" (not to be confused with the conspiracy theory that "Cultural Marxism" is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory--I assume Paulo Freire was not a Jew, but I admit I do not know for sure). Anyway I immediately went looking for a copy of Paulo Freire's seminal work so I check the quote out in context. Fortunately, the author of the paper appears to be a music professor at McGill, so the citation is right there for my use!
I fire up the Internet Archive and find a 1972 edition of the book (the UK printing, apparently) and turn to page 19, which... does not contain the quote. I pull up other editions--there's a 30th anniversary edition, a 50th anniversary edition, someone clearly regards this as an important text--and not only does the quote in question appear nowhere in these pages, but chunks like "education is political" or "neutral act" also return no results. Maybe the text search is wrong? Maybe the scan is bad? Hmm, no, a quick sampling finds the OCR did a bang-up job, actually.
Googling the full quote generates a number of results. The University of Sheffield's "Education Matters" blog gives the citation "Freire (1970: 19)." But no--the 1970 printing also lacks the quote. Dr. Fatima Nicdao (she/her) suggests it's actually (1968), but that's the Portugese date of publication, as near as I can tell. Anti-Racism in Higher Education: An Action Guide for Change is also pretty sure the quote appears on page 19, as does Reframing Assessment to Center Equity: Theories, Models, and Practices and Developing and Evaluating Quality Bilingual Practices in Higher Education, to name only three of the books that agree on this citation. You may notice that all of these books were published in the last two years.
At this point I'm thinking, "I've got to be missing something. Maybe I'm making this too difficult for myself. I haven't even checked Wikipedia!" There I find the following:
(emphasis added)
At this point I am feeling increasingly confident that the quotation is spurious. Now, it seems pretty clear to me that Freire would agree with the quotation! I don't think any of these people are misrepresenting his view (though they might be oversimplifying it). I'm able to date the quote "teaching is never a neutral act" back as far as 1998, in a book entitled (of course) White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America Similarly, "all education is political" goes back at least as far as a textbook from 1996:
As an aside, page 181 of that textbook is also of historic interest, and reads as part of a chapter on "Teaching to Empower Minority Students":
(Here is the list, for the curious, with definitions elided.)
Anywhow, I am terminally crippled with self-doubt, and proving a negative is hard. Part of me is certain that the very first reply to this rant is going to be "oh here's a direct link to the page where he wrote that, you just missed it." But I cannot find any evidence at all that Paolo Freire ever actually wrote the sentence, "all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act." Certainly those words do not seem to appear in any English-language translation of anything he has written. Which, who cares, right? Spurious quotations are totally an Internet thing, Abraham Lincoln said so.
But I care, because now instead of finding an academically useful citation I've spent three hours going down the rabbit hole of a spurious quotation. How can so many people be publishing stuff with this quote in it, and none of them paused long enough to check their source? I mean, I guess this is in the end just a particularly academic example of the old "too good to check." But I'm frustrated in part because none of the foregoing accomplishes what I actually intended to accomplish today, which was to make progress on a scholarly paper. There's no place for me to publish a peer-reviewed essay entitled "Spurious Quotations in Education Theory: Jesus Christ You Critical Theorists Are the Worst Academics Alive, Check Your God Damn Sources For Once, You're a Fucking Embarrassment to the Profession."
So please. Embarrass me, instead. Find evidence that Freire actually wrote the quoted phrase. Somewhere, anywhere, in any language! Because right now I'm feeling extremely uncharitable toward my outgroup on this, and it's such a petty thing, I know, but it just feels emblematic of the entire critical enterprise of focusing on "whatever works" over and above any commitment to truth, facts, history, academic rigor, professionalism, or even taking two seconds to check the damn source.
Looks like a classic case of citogenesis, hmm? /u/gwern really is a national treasure.
It probably won’t make you feel any better, but this sort of thing is much more likely than we might prefer!
Hold on. From the 30th anniversary ed., p. 34. This is the last page of the foreword, written by one Richard Shaull:
So, uh…who the hell is Jane Thompson? The quote traces back to here. In turn, Jane L. Thompson wrote a book called Adult Education for a Change in 1980. But what’s this? She was just quoting, too! Her citation brings us to
Full circle.
...this is worse than I thought!?
The Wikipedia citation goes to the book
On page 5 of that book, the quote is indeed attributed to Jane Thompson, as the editor of another book. The Gramsci book is on archive.org, the footnote points us to a 1980 text by Thompson, Adult Education for Change at page 26 (but also repeated in a different text by M. Mayo). That book is also on archive.org, and when you turn to page 26, you can see Thompson has block-quoted the block-quoted text, which she attributes to Paulo Freire! But return to the 1972 Freire text and you will see that, no, that quote is definitely part of Shaull's introduction to the book.
Just... astonishing. Multiple misattributions, literally none of the people quoting Shaull had any idea what they were doing. Words fail me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link